Fighting is in my code

I recently released a free demo of Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball on Steam. I figured at the same time I would run some ads on reddit to see if I could boost the impact of releasing the demo. I managed to dig up some interesting results and wanted to share them.

Reddit Clicks

During this test I ran two campaigns. One was longer and targeted at r/Games, a popular subreddit dedicated to industry news and relatively in-depth gaming discussion. The other was shorter and targeted at a category reddit calls ‘gamers’, which includes subscribers to a wide selection of game-related subreddits. I spent $200 on each campaign, using the same ad for each. Here are my results:

The important numbers are: $200 on r/Games delivered 165K impressions and 714 clicks at $0.28 cost per click. $200 on 'Gamers’ delivered 270K impressions and 625 clicks at $0.32 cost per click.

At first glance, the second campaign ('Gamers’) appears to have higher spikes, but that’s mainly because it was run on a shorter duration. The broad Gamers campaign actually had fewer overall clicks then the narrow r/Games campaign. However, because a wider targeting is cheaper per-impression, my cost-per click wound up being very similar (around $0.30).

One big difference is I got about 60% more impressions out of the broad Gamers campaign. Impressions are important because they have intangible benefits of raising awareness and possibly driving traffic through direct searches via Steam. So in the future I would probably continue using the broad Gamers approach.

I’d say the $0.30 cost-per-click is a decent result, definitely better than what I’ve gotten in my Twitter ad experiments. With revenue per-game sale at $7, I would need about 1 out of 23 clicks to convert to a full sale in order to be profitable. This is fuzzed a bit because some people may buy the game much later on sale, some people may not click on the ad but buy the game anyways because they saw it on reddit, some people may buy a 4-pack, some people might cause 20 other people to buy it. But it’s a good point of reference.

Steam Traffic

What did these ad clicks mean once people got to the Steam page? Fortunately, Steam now provides detailed traffic analysis. Here are my stats for the demo during that time period:

The big green line represents traffic primarily from the Steam New Demos page, and the purple line represents external site traffic (not stacked). 70% of those external traffic hits are from reddit, so you can consider the purple line the 'reddit’ line. As you can see, there’s a slightly elevated level during the first weeklong r/Games campaign, and more of a spike during the two-day Gamers campaign.

The majority of total traffic came from the page where Steam lists recently released demos. So in that sense, $400 of reddit advertising drove only a fraction of the game page traffic as what the Steam New Demos page provided.

However - traffic from the Steam New Demos page increased during the second reddit campaign, even though you would expect a steady downward decline as it moves from the top of the list. Is this spike a result of those 200K impressions raising awareness ? Quite possibly. Here is a comparison of Disco Dodgeball game page views that came from the Steam New Demos page (top) compared to total overall impressions on that page. 

You can see a big spike in clicks from the New Demos page even though overall impressions was constant. I think this is a good sign that raised awareness from the reddit ad triggered a greater clickthrough rate while it was in that list. 

Steam Downloads

It is very important to note that game page traffic is not the same as actual downloads, so I’ll break that down now.

Here is a chart that shows downloads of the demo over the same time period:

Unfortunately, the first reddit campaign is washed out by all the traffic coming from the Steam Demos page, so it’s tough to draw a conclusion there. However, that second huge spike can almost entirely be attributed to the second reddit campaign. At that time, there is a matching spike in traffic both directly from the reddit ad and from increased clickthrough on the Steam New Demos page. It looks like an increase over baseline of 200-250 demo downloads. So basically, that means the cost of the second ad worked out to about $1 per demo download (plus all the intangible benefits).

Conversion to Sales

Ok, so if we’ve estimated that it’s $1 per demo download, that means I can be profitable with the ad if 1 out of 7 demo users eventually buy the full version - about 14%. Unfortunately, my conversion rate from demo to paid is actually closer to 1%. I don’t know what the Steam standard is, but I’m guessing there are these specific factors involved in my particular case:  

- I designed the demo as a 'long-term’ sell - players can get a lot of playtime out of the demo including most multiplayer content, with the goal that dedicated players will find value in the advanced features as they invest more playtime. I’m hoping/expecting conversion rate to go up over time based on this approach.

- The game is still in Early Access, which tends to deter full version purchases.

- The game itself is very highly rated (99% positive), so I don’t think it’s an issue of game quality. But players getting a free demo are inherently less invested in the game than someone that made a purchase, so it’s possible the wider population of demo players are less interested in the game than the core group that bought it. I will need to compare playtime of demo vs. paid players to see if demo retention is a problem.

- The number of players that have added Disco Dodgeball to their wishlist is steadily increasing, at this point at a rate faster than actual sales. I don’t have full historical data on this so it’s hard to tell exactly what the impact of the demo is on wishlist additions. But if a ton of people add the game to their wishlist and then buy on launch date, then the demo has done exactly its job.

Key Takeaways

- Targeting Gamers instead of r/Games got much higher impressions for the same cost with only slightly fewer clicks.

- The large number of impressions from the ad likely drove additional awareness and demo downloads when the game appeared elsewhere in Steam.

- $200 of traffic from reddit ads resulted in less traffic, but equivalent demo downloads as the Steam New Demos page did.

- For every $1 spent on reddit advertising I got about one demo download. 

- Increasing click-rate of the reddit ad, improving the promotional materials on the Steam game page itself, and increasing conversion from demo-to-paid are all ways to improve the effectiveness of this spending.

- It seems likely that demo players are adding this game to their wishlist, but the big question remains of how many will purchase on launch date or later in the future.

- The actual near-term financial benefit is low, but I think there are good indications that this investment could be worthwhile over a longer term.

- Even if a free demo player never buys the game, they are adding value to the game because Disco Dodgeball has a big multiplayer component and their presence help build up a community of players and provides a boost to network effects.

| Arcade |